Nothing but a lot of dark and silence.
“Hello?” I called up the shaft.
No answer.
The shiver started at the base of my neck and ran clear down to my toes.
If they’d been attacked, I would have heard something, wouldn’t I? Unless they’d been overwhelmed by grendels, ghouls, and spawn, and torn limb from—
Stop it. They’re fine. You’re going to be fine. If everything up there got carried off to hell in a handbasket, you’re not gonna do yourself or Ollie any good by hitching a ride along with them. I took a deep breath. It’s not a problem, Mac. They’ll find you. You’ve got a tracking chip in your . . .
Armor that you’re no longer wearing.
Dammit.
Either something in this room simply affected my reception, or the signal was being deliberately jammed. It didn’t matter which it was, both meant I was on my own until reinforcements arrived. And they would arrive.
Unless they didn’t.
My eyes went to the eggs which were starting to look more like a pile of giant Mexican jumping beans. The egg closest to me had two slits that hadn’t been there half a minute ago. A pair of claws appeared through the slits, and the baby monster slashed its way through the membrane that was keeping it from being first in the chow line.
Ollie was having himself a panic attack, and I was about to join him.
As far as I could tell, whoever had strung Ollie up had opened the grate, run the rope through the pulley, then lowered him until he was right above the nest. I couldn’t reach the ladder on the wall, unless . . . I did some quick thinking. I had an idea. It might work, it might not, but it was the only idea my brain was giving me right now.
If I could cut Ollie down, I could pull down the rest of the rope that he’d been hanging from, Ollie could boost me up enough to reach the base of the metal ladder. I’d pull myself up, tie the rope to the ladder for Ollie to climb . . .
I stopped and snorted. Ollie shimmying up a rope? Might as well ask him to sprout wings while I’m at it. But the rest of my plan was entirely doable—unless I got to the top of the ladder and the grate was locked, welded in place, or it was too heavy to push up. It was pitch-dark up there, so I didn’t know what I’d be climbing into . . .
“But if you don’t do something and stop flapping your jaws,” I snapped at myself, “you’re gonna get eaten.”
Motivation found.
No, Ollie wasn’t the athletic type, but I think he’d find his inner mountain climber real quick if not climbing that rope meant being eaten alive. If a mom could lift a couple tons of car off her child, Ollie could haul his ass out of a concrete bunker.
Though none of that was gonna happen until I cut Ollie down.
I didn’t know how much Ollie weighed, but I knew once I cut that rope, he’d come down. Fast. Smack-dab in the middle of that nest.
Not if the nest wasn’t there, said the little voice in my head. You know the one. The voice responsible for telling your buddies, “Hey, y’all, watch this!” after drinking vast quantities of alcohol, and before doing something guaranteed to land your ass in the hospital. But just because I didn’t want to move the eggs didn’t mean that it was a bad idea. Actually, it was a very good idea. There were about thirty of them. Two dozen, plus a few extra. If they were chickens, it’d be less than three cartons.
Screw it. Just pick up the damned eggs, Mac.
Yeah, I was wearing gloves, but if one of those grendels picked the next two minutes to hatch, they’d bite through them like casings wrapped around sausages. I grabbed the egg closest to me, the one with the two claw slashes. If I put it on the bottom of the pile, I could bury it under its siblings. The grendel inside squirmed frantically to get out. I squeaked and ran and put the egg on what looked like a trash heap in the corner. It took every bit of control I had not to raise that squeak to a scream. On the next trip, I grabbed one egg in each hand. It doubled my urge to scream, but it’d get the job finished faster. After the fourth trip, the grendel squeals got louder, and my carrying turned into tossing and kicking.
After the last eggs left my hand and boot, and I had a landing pad for Ollie.
I took one look at Ollie’s panic-stricken face and decided to leave his gag in for the trip down. The last thing either one of us needed was for the little British guy to go into loud and vocal hysterics the moment his mouth was unstoppered. Just because anyone hadn’t popped in to introduce themselves as our captors didn’t mean they weren’t close by.
In response, Ollie went red in the face and squealed in indignation.
“Shut up!” I whispered emphatically.
I’d definitely made the right choice by leaving that gag in.
Suddenly the grate over our heads was lifted off. I doused my light and flattened myself against the wall—for all the good it’d do me.
Someone or something in black rappelled down into the room from the now-open ceiling grate.
I got my gun in my hand—the real one.
“Mac!” came an urgent whisper. Ian’s whisper.
With shaking hands, I holstered my gun and started breathing again. I’d damned near shot my partner.
A couple of seconds later, Calvin followed Ian down.
I stepped away from the wall. “How did you find—”
“Not now.” Ian unhooked himself from the rope, and quickly attached my harness to it. He looked up and gave a quick nod to Yasha and Rolf leaning over the edge of the grate opening.
“We’ll get Ollie,” Ian told me. “You leave. Now.”
I pointed at the pile I’d made. “Hatching eggs!”
Ian nodded, and put both of my hands on the rope then squeezed them hard to tell me to hold on.
I’d barely gotten a good grip when Yasha and Rolf hauled me up and through the hole in the ceiling. Sometimes, it’s good to be small.
Once topside, it was graffiti and garbage as far as the eye could see. Though the only light was Yasha’s and Rolf’s headlamps, and the occasional lightbulb down what looked to be a train tunnel. I was about to ask if this was the old Forty-second Street station when I saw a dingy, black-and-white-tiled “42nd ST.” barely visible on the far wall.
Rolf was alert to any movement from the surrounding dark, and I knelt next to the open grate, willing Ian and Calvin to hurry. Yasha reached in to the pulley, unwound the rope holding Ollie, and he and Rolf quickly lowered him to the ground. Ollie started to flail around which only excited the spawn even more. Ian got in Ollie’s face and whatever he said, made the little guy go pale; I could see it from here. The chittering from the spawn rose in pitch and intensity.
Ian cut the ropes on Ollie’s hands and arms, leaving Calvin to take care of the ones on his legs and ankles. Ollie pulled his gag out and didn’t make a sound. Thank God for small miracles. He must have known that what the ghouls had done to him would pale in comparison to what Ian would do if he even thought about opening his mouth. Ian and Calvin hauled him over to the ropes and got him hooked up.
Yasha and Rolf hauled the much-heavier-than-me Ollie out of the hole with only minimal swearing. At least I assumed Rolf’s angry hisses were Norwegian curses.
Once he was out, Ollie sucked in air to say or scream who knew what.
I clapped my hand across his mouth. Ollie complied. Miracle number two.
I glanced back at the now seething pile of eggs. The spawn were hatching and frantically clawing their way free of their eggs.
Ian and Calvin quickly pulled themselves hand over hand out of the concrete bunker/monster nursery. A group of newly hatched spawn scuttled on all fours to reach the ropes. It wouldn’t do any good, but it was still all I could do not to reach down and start hauling on those ropes myself. When Ian and Calvin got within reach, Yasha and Rolf reached down, grabbed the drag handles on the back of their armor, and hauled them the rest of the w
ay out. Half a dozen spawn were halfway up the ropes when Ian and Calvin detached the ropes from their harnesses, sending rope and grendels falling to the bunker floor. More spawn started jumping for the ladder, though “launched” would have been a better description, coming mere inches from reaching the bottom rung.
Rolf had a grenade in his hand, his blue eyes gleaming. He pulled the pin and tossed the grenade in the exact middle of the egg pile. I expected a boom. Instead there was a hiss and a loud pop as flames raced over the eggs that had just hatched, and those struggling to free themselves from their eggs. The insides of the eggs must have contained a fatty substance. It popped and crackled like bacon on a too-hot griddle.
I watched in disgusted wonder until the stench wafted up through the grate opening.
Rolf pulled another grenade from a pouch on his armor and dropped it straight down. He winked. “Incendiary grenades. That’ll discourage the jumpers. Not to worry, I have the other kind, too.”
Ian and Yasha quickly lifted and replaced the grate back over the opening and Calvin rolled what looked like a railroad pushcart on top of it. Calvin talked fast into his comms as Ian and Yasha got on either side of Ollie and hauled him to his feet.
Suddenly, my comms came back to life. All hell had broken loose somewhere.
“This is Lars. I’ve got movement ahead.” Shouts and gunfire erupted in the background. “Spawn. We’ve got spawn.”
“Sandra here. Watch your six, Lars. They’re behind you, too. Hang on, we’re coming in.”
“Tunnel’s packed with ghouls.” It was Roy. “Clearing a path to y’all now.”
Explosions filled my ears and shook the ground, knocking me on my butt and pieces of concrete from the walls.
Calvin gave me a hand up. “Lars’s team found the main lair in a series of old maintenance rooms down there.” He flashed a grin full of white teeth. “Sounds like we’re missing quite a party.”
I stared back at him, dumbfounded. None of the guys appeared to be in any hurry to get down there to help. “Aren’t we going to help them?”
“They’ve got their job,” Ian said. “We’ve got ours. The two adult grendels weren’t in the lair.”
Oh crap.
“What time is it?”
“Thirty minutes ’til midnight. We think they’re already making their way to the surface. After we get Ollie close to the surface and cut him loose, we’re going big-game hunting.”
26
THE platform of the abandoned subway station was dark, dirty, and—aside from the occasional explosion in the chambers and tunnels beneath us—it was entirely too quiet. Broken wine and beer bottles littered the ground along with food wrappers, cigarette butts, aerosol paint cans, and discarded syringes.
To better listen for the adult grendels, we’d switched our comms to another channel. Calvin kept his on SPI’s main channel to keep tabs on the faint booms still coming from below, and to know when—or if—we could be expecting company up here that we actually wanted to have. Since we’d been tasked with stopping two adult grendels, it would be nice to have more than five of us to do it.
Ollie had his back against the wall, knees clutched to his chest. At least he wasn’t in a fetal position. However, he was babbling.
“What the hell’s he saying?” Calvin asked.
Ollie’s eyes were focused, but not on us. He had that thousand-yard stare that I’d heard sometimes happened after serious trauma. Being kidnapped by ghouls, hog-tied, and damn near fed to baby monsters certainly qualified.
Fortunately, I was fluent in panic attack.
“Ollie? It’s Mac. You’re safe.” Though safe for any of us was relative right now. “You need to hush until we can get you out of here.” I glanced at Ian in unspoken question. He nodded once. “We are getting you out of here, but you need to calm down. You understand?”
Ollie swallowed hard.
I figured that was about as much of a yes as I was likely to get.
“Calvin, what’s the fastest way to the surface?” Ian asked.
“The stairs to that pedestrian passageway I told you about. The one that—”
Ian’s warning glance cut him off.
I knew what he’d been about to say. The one the grendels would probably be using to get to the surface. A full-grown grendel was the last thing Ollie needed to see or hear about.
At the mention of a way out of his nightmare, any way at all, Ollie latched onto it like a life preserver. “I’ll take it.”
“You don’t want to go there,” I told him.
“If it’s away from this bloody—”
Ian jerked his chin upward. “What about the main Times Square station?”
“There’s a maintenance stairway,” Calvin told him. “Down that hall and around the corner. Secured with a chain and padlock down here, and a dead bolt topside.”
“Can you get through?”
Calvin spread his hands. “Please. You insult me.”
“Do it. Let’s get him out of here.” The “and out of our hair” was strongly implied.
At this point, Ollie’d probably gnaw through those chains with his teeth.
We got Ollie up and moving. Knowing that he was on his way out brought back the ornery little Englishman that most of us knew, but only one of us liked.
Ian gave Ollie a pair of twenties. “When you’re in the station, get on a train and go. Direction doesn’t matter. Just get as far away from Times Square as you can.”
“The Full Moon,” I told him. “On Thompson Street one block off West Third. Tell Nancy and Bill we sent you. They’re good people. They’ll take care of you.”
Ollie’s eyes went almost as wide as they’d been when we’d hauled him up. Terror mixed with distaste. “They’re werewolves.”
This from a man who sold shrunken heads and monkey brains for a living.
Yasha had just turned wolf again a few minutes ago and was standing guard down on the tracks, and while I hoped he hadn’t heard Ollie, I knew he had. Fortunately, Yasha was of a mind that people with distasteful personalities didn’t taste good. It was probably the only thing saving Ollie’s nasty bacon right about now.
“They’re. Good. Folks,” I told him. I didn’t care if he was traumatized. Rude was rude. “We’ve had this talk before.”
Calvin took Ollie’s arm and hustled him down the platform and out of sight.
I felt Ian watching me.
“And we’ve had this talk before,” I told him. “Partners, remember? I’m here. I’m staying.”
In response, Ian took a couple of steps into the shadows, and came back with a double armful of my armor, with my paintball rifle slung over one shoulder. “I know you’re staying; that’s why I brought all this up here with me.”
He started helping me get geared up, and I grabbed a couple of pieces and started hurriedly putting them on myself. Standing there on those subway tracks, I knew just how a naked turtle would feel out in the middle of a highway. I tried not to think that shell or not, that turtle was roadkill as soon as the first truck came along—or, in my case, grendel. I’d rather see the headlights of an oncoming train on those abandoned tracks. It’d be less terrifying.
Yasha smiled a wolfy smile at us, then it turned into a predatory grin as he loped down the tunnel and into the darkness. A few minutes later, he appeared in the dim light, having doubled back to patrol in the opposite direction. He’d pause occasionally and raise his muzzle, letting the air currents flow over his nose that was the size of my closed fist. As far as fists went, it wasn’t that big. As far as wolf noses went, it was enormous. He padded back to where we were, and with one smooth leap, landed lightly on the platform. He gave us a grumbling growl which I’d learned meant that he didn’t find anything and he didn’t like or trust it.
Ian jerked his head toward the platform. “Let’s get you up there with
Yasha.” He kept his voice low as we climbed the short ladder. “The teams know where we are. As soon as they clean up, we’ll be getting plenty of backup.”
That’d be a lot of firepower to unleash directly below an in-use subway station. Not that I was against it. I was all for any and every kind of firepower we needed. “Won’t they hear us up there?”
“No chance. Even if it wasn’t New Year’s Eve, that’s one of the busiest stations in town, and tonight it’ll be packed with thousands of rowdy people. We could be firing cannons down here and no one would know.”
From what we’d experienced back at headquarters, a cannon might be the only thing that could put a dint in a grendel, and I wished we had one.
Calvin came running back to where we were.
“Ollie?” Ian asked without looking away from where he worked on my last few armor buckles.
“Gone.”
I started. “What kind of gone?”
“Gone as in on a train.” Calvin’s face was set on scowl. “With his bitching about having to take ‘uncivilized transportation,’ he’s lucky to have made it to a train.”
Best I could tell it’d been at least five minutes since the last explosion. That could be good or really bad. One meant we’d have backup soon. The other meant we’d never see our coworkers again. I was gonna go with the first one.
Ian finished with my armor. His eyes searched my face. “You okay, Mac?”
There were all kinds of okay; and right now, I wasn’t any of them. Our backup needed backup, my main weapon was a paintball gun, and my real gun might as well have been loaded with BBs for all the good it was going to do me or anyone else.
“Just peachy.”
“I need you to be on this platform.”
“So I can be out of everyone’s way?”
“So you can see down the tunnel in both directions, and blast their heads with paint. Eye shots if you can get it. Blind them long enough for us to kill them. And if you can’t mark them, just fire on their position; we’ll follow with live ammo. Calvin, you and Rolf take the northbound tracks. Me and Yasha will watch the south. Let’s go to bright light.”
The Grendel Affair: A SPI Files Novel Page 26